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Today’s the perfect day to talk about CVdoo. It seems like only yesterday all I had was an idea and some notes jotted down, but today, no more than three months later, I’m set to pitch CVdoo at the Innovation Masterclass organized by the European Young Innovators Forum. It should be a great opportunity to showcase the project and get feedback from experienced people like Xavier Damman (xdamman), co-founder of Storify, Fabien Petitcolas, Director of Innovation at Microsoft Europe, and Bruno Wattenbergh, founder and CEO of ImpulseBrussels, and it’s a major step for my startup.

CVdoo aims to create a better connection between jobseekers and recruiters through video. The idea came from my desire to make my own video CV and my inability to produce one. This fascination inspired a curiosity for how successful video CV’s are made and led to the realization that the majority of video CV’s online – as well as tools available to build your own – are, simply put, bad. This brought about the question as to why and so I set out to analyze the problem and find a solution.

Once I had an idea, I started talking to recruiters to hear their opinions and reactions, which was easy because I knew people in the recruitment industry, and I had an overall great response. I knew I was onto something so I started looking for a partner; I found my co-founder on Westartup, a community for entrepreneurs. Then it was time to get to work: we set up a landing page and ran an online survey. Unfortunately, the survey didn’t go far; it proved much more difficult than expected to get answers so I scrapped it to start again from scratch. However, I managed to conduct a couple of very insightful, formal interviews with recruiters to get their thoughts on paper and my co-founder is now hard at work on a prototype.

Regardless of our startup’s status, I thought we had a pretty innovative idea and it couldn’t hurt to get some visibility at a conference so I applied. A week later I received confirmation we’d been selected and I couldn’t have been happier; on the other hand, I was also nervous. Of course, we’d have to push ourselves. We still had no logo, let alone a pitch deck. I took some time to draw a logo by hand and eventually got something that looked nice but that was also simple enough for me to make on the computer. I worked on the pitch deck for a few days until I found a compelling way to present CVdoo and, finally, I rehearsed and practiced at home.

There isn’t a perfect way to go from paper to life and there isn’t a shortcut either, but you stack up together enough little things and you start getting somewhere. Today’s pitch is no more than the result of the work put in during the last couple of months and tomorrow’s success won’t simply come knocking on our door unless we keep it up.